Happy New Year. Read all the Crystal reports, sounded pretty good and similar to some of what we got at Hood Meadows. Big freezing rain event early on the 30th with really big winds, which luckily we missed, changed to nice deep smoke quality snow with big blue skies and sadly a record breaking crowd on the mountain – heard that folks got turned away from the parking lots (and they are big parking lots), locals all said it was a pretty amazing crowd. Other hard part about Saturday was the time it took the lifts opp’s to chip all the ice off some of the upper lifts to get them going. Lots of locals left early and lots of folks spent time in the lodge, but after the upper mountain lifts fired up during the later afternoon the lines got okay. Sunday the 1st was a whole lot better for everyone. We had a very very late arrival to the mountain at noon – nice sunny skies, really big views and no lift lines at all anywhere. Snow quality still was nice groomed or skier packed (or wind packed) snow. Watched a very nice sunset on the mountain. We stayed into the evening to get the first night skiing we’ve done in a lot of years. Very pretty under the lights. Meadows has some of the best terrain I’ve seen for night skiing. Only negative was all the drunk snowboarders swooping across every run like it was a big half pipe terrain park. I’m pretty good about watching for folks on the slopes – but it was pretty wild on some of the runs. Meadows has some good stuff, but a lot of the best was still closed. A week ago locals said it looked like high desert and it was obvious the snow pack is still pretty thin. Fun trip with Snojokes ski club, met a lot of new friends that I’ll get to see at Crystal. Meadows would be another good place to go with a deeper snow pack. ddk
